Automating policy management workflows: new capabilities in Xoralia

Amber Oakes
31 March 2025

Policy management is not straightforward and often the devil is in the detail. Policies must meet various standards, be approved and reviewed by the right people, and align with your compliance needs. With policy management, often the devil is in the detail.

One critical aspect of policy management is having the appropriate workflows through the document lifecycle – from the point a policy is created to subsequent regular reviews. By ensuring the right workflow is applied at the right time your policies will be accurate, up to date and compliant. But all too often policy management workflows are inconsistent, ad hoc or even non-existent. Policy management relies on email and spreadsheets, leading to errors, delays and policies thar are out of date.

A solution like Xoralia can help manage your policy workflows by using automation and ensuring all the right steps are followed for each individual policy. Our clients told us about the importance of setting up and automating workflows, so we have invested in new workflow management tools designed for maximum efficiency and compliance while reducing risks.

What are some of the challenges associated with policy management workflow?

Policy creation, review and approval all require the appropriate workflows being in place. But making these happen has some real challenges:

Stakeholders too busy: Everyone tends to be extremely maxxed-out and it is very easy to forget to do steps required around policy creation or approval.
Herding cats: Policy or risk teams or other service functions trying to coordinate policy management workflows can fight to get people’s attention, especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved.
Reliance on email: People rely on manual emails to manage the workflow which is extremely inefficient, leading to bottlenecks and items getting missed.
Admin overhead: Coordinating policy management workflows requires a lot of manual effort which not only is frustrating but also wastes time that most stretched business functions simply cannot afford.
Undermines compliance: It is very difficult to show you have a systematic approach to policy management to demonstrate to regulators or certification bodies when your approach to policy management workflows is largely manual and ad hoc.

Inefficient workflows lead to several issues:

The need to create or review a policy gets missed completely, either because somebody forgot, an email got missed or it went to the wrong person.
Policy reviews and approvals get delayed, so policy updates are late, leading to some policies going out of date.
Important stakeholders do not get to review and approve the policies they need to, leading to errors and risks.
Policy management processes and systems do not stand up for inspection for auditing or certification by external third parties.
Policies go out of date because they are not reviewed at all, ultimately eroding trust with people starting to ignore them.
Policies are not formatted correctly or have other errors.

Why are the benefits of automating policy management workflows?

When it comes to efficient and successful policy management workflow, a SharePoint-based governance solution like Xoralia can make all the difference. Xoralia does the heavy lifting by standardising and automating process workflows, so they happen at the right time, involve the right people, follow the standard steps and allows you track the whole process. This means you can:

Banish those highly frustrating and inefficient manual workflows based around email and spreadsheets that simply don’t work.
Gain ROI by automating the process
Eliminate errors, inconsistencies and delays through the standardisation and optimisation of policy-related processes.
Minimise risks by ensuring that policies are up to date and are always reviewed and signed off by the necessary experts and stakeholders.
Encourage cross-functional collaboration from different teams who need to work together on creating and reviewing policies.
Get back in control with an overview of where everything is, making interventions and giving nudges if necessary
Show everyone that you are investing in a policy management solution, driving accountability and transparency.
Save huge amounts of time for over-stretched administrators and eliminate any unnecessary manual overhead.

Why use Xoralia for policy workflow management?

There are many policy management solutions and governance suites out there. Xoralia has a particular advantage for workflow management because it is:

Highly flexible, so you can customise your workflows to meet the needs of different policy holders, avoiding the “one-size-fits-all” straitjacket of some other compliance solutions.
Is based on SharePoint, so integrates tightly into any Microsoft 365-powered digital workplace, and also helps maximise your investment in M365.
Is compliance and audit-ready so your workflow aligns with your compliance and regulatory standards and related reporting requirements.
Is very easy to use for everybody involved in the policy creation, review and approval workflow.

Xoralia’s policy workflow management features focus on three main areas:

Creating flexible workflows suited to your needs.
Supporting the creation of new policies and subsequent reviews.
Supporting audit, compliance and reporting.

Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Setting up your policy workflows

At the heart of workflow set-up within Xoralia is an intuitive workflow builder that enables administrator – through a simple point-and-click interface – to:

Set-up highly granular workflows for all your different types of policy such as IT, finance, HR, Health & Safety, Legal and more.
Ensure each workflow can pass through different steps and stages relating to initial drafting through to final approval, with as many rounds of revisions and approvals as you like.
Add all the appropriate subject matter experts, policy owners and other roles to each process step.
Customise different aspects of the policy with a number of settings relating to associated deadlines, notifications sent out, any templates to be used, and the ability to view details of the process to support transparency and accountability.

Supporting policy creation and subsequent reviews

Some of the most popular features of Xoralia are those that support the policy creation process and any subsequent policy reviews. This bring automation to policy management with flexible workflows throughout the document lifecycle that ensure your policies are up to date, supporting trust and compliance. Here several features stand out:

The ability to assign and enforce particular document templates to each type of policy, so policies are standardised, complete, optimised with the right structure and layout, and also are branded appropriately.
Ensure any policy at the end of the review is also assigned to the right SharePoint library and has the right metadata to support findability and gets published correctly.
Version control for each policy document.
Set a regular review date once a policy has been set up so that a policy does not expire, and the review process is never forgotten through notifications.
Help your policy owners, approvers and admins keep on track with a clear personalised view of any upcoming review and approval tasks, as well as visibility of where a policy is in the process.
Avoid the clumsy and confusing interfaces often associated with over-complex governance solutions and instead use a refreshing and modern interface that is familiar to Microsoft 365 users.

Support compliance and be audit-ready

Xoralia supports all your compliance needs with reporting and audit features:

There is a complete audit trail of everything that happens across each policy management workflow with every action and change logged automatically.
You can report on any historical data for the audit log, so you can fully meet your compliance and reporting needs for the long-term.
Have a clear real-time overview of the progress of every policy workflow, for example through status indicators, again supporting visibility, transparency and accountability.
Create all the reporting you need reflecting status, approval history and also any tasks that still need to be created.
Be ready for any audits by having all the data you need easily accessible, as well as the ability to show you have a robust, compliant and comprehensive approach to policy management and related workflows.

Automating policy management workflows

Applying the right review and approval workflows is critical for effective policy management. Automation and a fit-for-purpose solution are critical for managing policy workflows.

Why not organise a free demo of Xoralia to see the difference it can make to your business?

The story behind Xoralia

Xoralia was built by the team at Content Formula, an intranet and digital workplace consultancy that has built SharePoint intranets for some of the world’s most famous companies. Now, most companies want their policies and procedures on the intranet but they don’t just want to store them there, they also want tools to help better manage them. Over the years we came across just about every single requirement for a policy management system. As this article above explains, there are gaps in SharePoint and so we never built what in our mind was the perfect policy management system. However, one of our clients challenged us to build something for them that filled all the gaps but still used SharePoint at the back end. We had a great relationship with them and agreed to share the budget to do this, provided we could then market the solution to others. That was in 2019. We’re now on version 3 of Xoralia and the product has grown and evolved a lot.

3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia

Make it easy to find policies

Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering.

Reduce administrative burden

Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time

Demonstrate compliance and best practice

Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.

And lots more!

What our clients say

AppSource review

Uniting excellence in integration and features for seamless policy management

As the newly appointed IT Manager at our company, I was tasked with implementing the Xoralia policy management tool, and the experience has been nothing short of impressive.

Rian Stuart

IT Manager

TwinStream

G2 review

Improved efficiency and complicance with Xoralia

Xoralia has improved the way we handle, distribute, and track policies and procedures within our organization. Not only does it allow us to save a lot of time, but it has helped us also to maintain and track compliance. Currently, we have a 99% attestation rate.

Nadja Boyum

VP Marketing & HR

Boyum IT

How to get started with Xoralia

Step 1: request a demo

Fill out our form and we will be in touch to arrange a time. You can even book a time yourself.

Step 2: get a price proposal

If you think Xoralia is for you ask us for a quote. This will set out any options you may have.

Step 3: install and launch

We’ll install Xoralia in your environment (or you can do it yourself). We’ll provide training and support to get you up and running quickly.

Here's what you'll get

And last but not least:

Ready to get started?

Connect with us to streamline your policy management and ensure effortless compliance.

Perfect policy management solution for Microsoft 365 users.

I highly recommend Xoralia to any organisation seeking a robust and user-friendly policy management solution.

Xoralia seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365, particularly with SharePoint and Teams, aligning perfectly with our company's daily workflow..

Rian Stuart, IT Manager, Twinstream

★★★★★

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